Woken by the 6.00am alarm so that we could catch the 7.55am treno to Cinque Terre. Found a carpark (free) at La Spezia which is at a premium so actually getting one was a miracle. We clapped our hands at that effort. For those that aren’t aware there are 5 towns which are Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza & Monterosso. You can catch the treno and get off at each one or you can walk between each one or do a bit of both. We skipped the first 2 stops and got off at Corniglia. We are finding there is not a lot of tourist information anywhere or we are not asking the right people but off we set into Corniglia Centra. Up hill by road and already starting to feel the pinch we noticed a tourist bus passed us, on the steep hill, and realised that was how most people got to the centre of town. Whoops, mucked up again but that was an instance of the lack of information I’m talking about!
As we passed through the town we noticed the walking track to Vernazza which said 1hr 30mins so off we set. The start of the track was downhill but soon realised that wasn’t how it would continue. We had a few stops on the way as it was quite hilly and very uneven. It wasn’t until nearing the end when we were covered in a lather of sweat that we started to bump into other travellers going the other way which all said that we were pretty much down hill from here. Later I discovered Kim had read a sign indicating how to signal the helicopter if needed for an emergency, bloody lucky she didn’t tell me that earlier cause I would have been flapping everything available. Anyway as told the rest of our journey was very much downhill and we thought if we’d done the journey reverse we really would’ve struggled. We later found out that the track we walked was probably the hardest of all so we felt pretty happy with ourselves.
We found Vernazza to be the prettiest of them all as we were told by our host Mirco so after wandering the town for a little bit we decided to get back on the treno to see Monterosso and then come back to Vernazza for lunch. Yes we’d had enough of the walking caper and it was starting to really heat up. We have had 30+ temperatures ever since arriving in Italy and although today was the first to start off a little overcast it didn’t take long for it to clear up and become another magnificent day. There are many little restaurants dotted around in each town so we chose one and sat down and relaxed for a little while. Earlier whilst in Vernazza there was a little liquor store that we wandered into because I had read something about Limoncino and was keen to try some. The owner didn’t speak English but did manage to tell us it was 30% and soon took us toward the back of the store and started pouring us a shot each. So although it was still morning we hooked right in, we felt it going all the way down and found it quite pleasant.
Also while in Vernazza we needed to use the toilet. Now toilets are very, very hard to come by and apparently all the books mention this. We thought we’d try the one’s at the train station but not only did we not need the sign to find them because we could smell them, Kim took one look, darted out with a look of fear on her face and stated there is no f#$%ing way I’m going in there. Apparently she said it was like the toilet had sunk into the ground and I was certainly going to take her word for it, luckily we weren’t desperate! We had discovered that most of the tourists visiting Cinque Terre seem to be Aussies, Americans and Germans all of which speak English and none of which we wanted to listen to. Oh well you get that.
After lunch we continued onto the towns we hadn’t yet seen all of which are beautiful and finished off with Riomaggiore getting some lovely fresh fruit. After that we headed back to La Spezia, picked up a few groceries and found our car safe and sound. Arriving home at 6.00pm very sore and tired but having had a wonderful day. We are settling in now with our usual couple of drinks of Vodka which costs us between 4 and 7 euro for a 700ml bottle. We are heading off on a boat trip tomorrow at 10.00am but are waiting for Mirco to get home to confirm as he has made the arrangements, we will let you know how that goes as Kim doesn’t like boats so stay tuned. In any case we might actually get a sleep in!!!
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| Jane walking to Vernazza |
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